649. Should Ohio State (and Michigan, and Clemson) Join the N.F.L.?

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🗓️ 10 October 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

Soccer leagues around the world use a promotion-and-relegation system to reward the best teams and punish the worst. We ask whether American sports fans would enjoy a similar system. (Part two of a two-part series.)

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the second part of a two-part series, and the question we're trying to answer came from a listener's email.
0:10.3	James McGinty is a 69-year-old training consultant who lives in a small town outside of Glasgow, Scotland.
0:16.6	He wrote in, after hearing an episode of ours called When is a Superstar Just Another Employee?
0:22.2	Episode number 557, if you want to look it up.
0:25.1	That episode looked into the daily life of the athletes who play in the National Football League,
0:30.2	which, if you don't know, is the most profitable and powerful sports league in history.
0:36.0	The episode included data from a survey that the players' union had done.
0:40.0	They were hoping to put pressure on team owners to improve workplace conditions.
0:44.6	The people who own NFL teams aren't nearly as exploitive of their labor force as they
0:50.1	used to be.
0:50.5	Still, the survey showed that some of the team's operations were surprisingly
0:54.9	shoddy and that some of the owners were surprisingly cheap. Anyway, here's what James McGinty
1:00.7	wrote. I was stunned to hear that the average career length for a player was 3.3 years. This is
1:07.4	essentially a product of the monopoly system that is the NFL.
1:12.2	McGinty pointed out that in European soccer, players often begin their professional careers at age 17 or 18 and play into their mid-30s.
1:21.3	Because of the pyramid system, McGinty wrote, and by pyramid, he means the top professional soccer leagues in each country and the other pro leagues below them. Because of this, he wrote, and by Pyramid, he means the top professional soccer leagues in each country and the
1:27.9	other pro leagues below them. Because of this, he wrote, players can continue to play, albeit at
1:33.8	lower salaries. And so, he wondered, would it be worth your doing an episode showing these comparisons
1:39.8	and questioning whether the NFL should end their monopoly and move to a pyramid system.
1:47.1	Well, yes, James McGinty, that is worth doing an episode on, or actually two.
1:52.3	In last week's episode, we floated the basic premise that the NFL and the NBA while we're at it
1:58.3	might think about a new type of expansion by merging with the
	...

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